capriciouscorvid said

haha Skyrim is…. an acquired taste. It may have something in common with WoW but the puzzles are a far cry from BotW. Honestly I’d assume WoW is better because of my experience with Blizzard’s design choices in Overwatch. Everything in Skyrim gives an illusion of depth without having much substance. Combat and puzzles especially. I could take it or leave it on most plot too. There’s also the fact it’s horribly game breakingly buggy. Still, it’s fun?? Lore is neat.

I think I came off more down on Skyrim than I meant btw. It’s a really an impressive title, even by scale alone. I think it’s a super worthwhile open world game and I failed to mention that. It does a good job making things feel epic. sorry ‘bout that

I don’t mind hearing criticism, especially over a game I still may decide not to get. Even my former lover prefers Oblivion over Skyrim as far as ES games go. Puzzle depth isn’t something I’m overly concerned about because I’m usually following a players’ guide, and it’s not as though either WoW or BotW are being played for the complexity of their combat (compared to earlier 3D Zeldas, perhaps, but that’s a pretty low bar to clear). I’d also hope that after multiple ports and special editions and such the Switch version would be relatively bug-free, but I guess we’ll find out about that once it hits the shelves in a few days.

USUM looks distinctly unimpressive, so I’m probably not going to bother. On the flip side, I’ve just become aware that Skyrim of all things is getting a Switch port. I’ve never played any Elder Scrolls games, though a former lover of mine is really into them so I heard quite a bit about the series indirectly. I might have additional motivation to pick up a Switch in a month or two.

By coincidence my new place of work is only a few blocks away from a movie theatre, and as I worked late yesterday (and because tickets prices are actually reasonable before noon) I took the opportunity of a free morning to see Murder on the Orient Express. My prior familiarity with Agatha Christie was limited to having read And Then There Were None in middle school, so this was first exposure to her Belgian detective with outrageous facial hair. It was refreshing to see an English-language movie that acknowledges the ethnic and linguistic diversity of continental Europe (while also weirdly commenting on the similar albeit more artificial diversity of the US), but if anyone’s going to unpack the potential social and representative commentary in this movie it certainly won’t be me. It’s rather all over the place, though the French get off quite lightly and in the end everything pivots around Anglos because of who wrote this story. At least Poirot himself is mostly intact and hasn’t been contorted into a clone of one of the contemporary iterations of Sherlock Holmes. 

Oh, and since I understand that Johnny Depp is one of those celebrities who is now a pariah in internet circles on account of his personal life one may enjoy – spoiler alert, I suppose – a film that sees him stabbed repeatedly.

@eldraftsman and @zeldassmile

You guys got off into quite the discussion in replies and I’m a little late to getting back to them, so just a couple of disconnected points:

  • To reiterate, I don’t actually ship Urbosa/Zelda or personally have trans Link headcanons. I’m just acknowledging that they exist and that some people like them, and I think that diversity in fan interpretation is rarely a bad thing. Also, as eldraftsman points out it’s fallacious to dismiss Urbosa/Zelda because it’s “pedophilia” when A) Zelda is most definitely past puberty so it would actually be ephebophilia, B) age of consent varies by jurisdiction, and it’s impossible to say with any accuracy how it would be regarded in a fictional setting that never addresses the subject, and C) I seriously doubt it’s a major concern for the developers; recall that in Ocarina of Time an almost definitely prepubescent Link is duped into an engagement and the whole thing is played for comedy, or that in BotW itself there’s a Zora who appears to be a child yet gets involved in some fashion with an adult Hylian man.
  • The question of Link as a self-insert is a very old conundrum that’s even baked into his name (he’s the link between the player and the game world – someone in 1986 was feeling clever). There have been times when the games allow for the player’s input on certain story scenes, but most of the time that’s either not an option or the choices are irrelevant. BotW is notable in that almost nothing in the game is actually mandatory to complete it, including the flashbacks that showcase the development of Link’s character and his relationship with Zelda or anyone else. Of course these shouldn’t be discounted if we’re talking about Link as a discrete character, but the fact remains that the player can choose to ignore them and craft their own adventure to a degree not seen since the NES days. BotW Link’s not a full-on blank slate PC like those from MMOs, but he comes damn close. I’d compare him to death knight PCs from World of Warcraft, who like him come pre-packaged with a heroic backstory that was brutally cut short by tragedy, after which they are reawakened under strange and ominous circumstances.
  • On a related note, I never bought into that most outdated of gaming carrots on a stick, rescuing damsels in distress, specifically because it  (and the inferred promise of heterosexual love/romance/sex for the protagonist) never appealed to me. Clearly there are players who get personally invested in those scenarios – look at the recent outcry over Peach’s behavior at the of Super Mario Odyssey, for an immediate example – but since I’m outside that assumed straight male demographic it doesn’t do a thing for my sense of immersion. Certainly Zelink and some of the secondary M/F pairings like Malink and Midlink can play into that dynamic, but I prefer to pull different ideas from those interactions even if I’m not treating Link as a self-insert just because doing otherwise would be really boring. (Note that there are exceptions – I admit that the Zelink dynamic in Spirit Tracks is pretty fun, and at least one-sided Midlink can play into Midna’s broader development well enough.)
  • Kind of a humorous last note, but I’ve gleaned from a little research that many vocal anti-Sidlink fans are specifically bothered by how the ship’s fanbase plays up the size difference and, er, rough logistics that would probably be involved. To this I should point out that Sidlink is just the latest in a long line of M/M ships that pair Link with a man who is much larger, more dominant, and/or just outright evil. Whether that’s Ganondorf, Dark Link, Ghirahim, Groose, Demise, Linebeck, more Dom versions of himself with Four Swords selfcest…to paraphrase a gay friend of mine who’s also a fan of the series, Link is just a big ol’ bottom in fandom. As a bottom myself I could suggest that this trend reflects how physically demanding bottoming is and how it requires a fair bit of courage (heh), but I may be giving the fanbase a little too much credit with that reading. In any case, giant shark dicks is old hat at this point, with the only thing surprising being that Sidlink has become so wildly popular. Positivity + size kink = fandom gold, apparently.

marzipanandminutiae:

forthegothicheroine:

I feel torn about tumblr’s love of southern gothic.  There’s a lot of cool stuff in that genre to be admired, but I feel like sometimes those posts (especially when made by people who don’t live in the south- and hey, neither do I) come across as “aren’t poor people spooooky?”

As a born-and-raised southerner, I was surprised to discover this literary convention because a lot of modern southern gothic fantasy written by southerners focuses on old-money families who turn out to be [witches/werewolves/vampires/etc]. I didn’t encounter the “scary redneck mountain people” variant in non-fantastical media until later, and it baffles me because the modern southern elite are TERRIFYING.

Endlessly smiling hypocritical senators in tacky palatial houses with wives who espouse “traditional values” while being poisonously sweet and cutthroat? Those make much more frightening antagonists for gothic heroes/heroines to fight. If you live in the south you will probably never meet backwoods demon sibling-spouses but you’ve definitely seen the void staring out of a “Live, Laugh, Love” picture frame.

I’ve almost never come across the impoverished rural Southern gothic variant, but then again all the old money examples with which I’m familiar are specifically ruined old money: once-wealthy families sunken into poverty and irrelevance (and sometimes undeath, if you want a surprisingly fitting fantastical metaphor) by a changing world. I get the impression that a gothic take on more modern forms of wealth would be less distinctly Southern and more generally American WASPish, because without the darkness of the plantation economy to color the setting there’s a lot of overlap.

Of course, New Orleans is an entity unto itself even in modern takes on the gothic, what with the strong occult themes and the bizarre way in which the Anglo new money had to ingratiate themselves into a Catholic and strongly Latin society once they realized they couldn’t eradicate it entirely.

zeldassmile said

hey, can you not tag this to zelink? most people in the tag are looking for straight up zelink content, and we really don’t want to see people going off in how they dislike it

As this is the third response I’ve gotten to this effect, allow me to expand on this point. (I’ll also be tagging this post with both ships so as to clear up any further confusion.)

I wouldn’t say I dislike Zelink; actually, in both the post in question and in my personal ranking of Breath of the Wild I pointed out that this game is up there with Spirit Tracks and Skyward Sword (and even Link’s Awakening if you interpret Marin’s as a subconscious projection of Link’s feelings for Zelda rather than as a character in her own right) in terms of offering plenty of material for shipping the two. It would be more accurate to say that I’m largely indifferent to the pairing. It’s certainly there to one degree or another in nearly every game in the series, and it’s up to the player to take it or leave it. In my case – especially if we accept the Link-as-self-insert concept the developers still apparently intend, for whatever reason – that means leaving it, and I’ve never cared enough to get involved in any Zelda shipping debates. If we define shipping as emotional investment via the production and/or consumption of fanwork I can’t even really consider myself an active shipper for any Zelda pairings, including Sidlink. I have in my time on this blog snarked on the peculiar phenomenon of Link/male!Sheik, considered Impa/Zelda in Skyward Sword as part of a larger series on homoerotic subtext in Nintendo games, and referenced Sidlink as well as trans Link headcanons and Urbosa/Zelda in the aforementioned (afore-linked?) BotW ranking (mostly in the sense that I’m aware that they exist and some people like them, and that they play very well into the game’s focus on player choice and customization), but mostly disinterested meta is about as much as this series has ever gotten out of me.

I do believe there’s a place for that kind of discussion, even when it pertains to ships. Ship hate is to me more along the lines of belligerent criticism that doesn’t encourage conversation, homophobia, racism, or other forms of prejudice, or misapplying concepts like pedophilia and incest to attempt to shut down discussion in the guise of social justice. Acknowledging the presence of a ship and variations on its depiction (particularly for one like Zelink that has varied substantially across games), especially as they relate to larger themes of a work, can make for very interesting discourse and help people form and develop headcanons. Regarding shipping tags as an uninterrupted feedback loop of positivity without room for neutrality on a pairing – much less outright criticism – strikes me as a very boring philosophy, and it ignores that there are respectful ways to say that something doesn’t really engage you. 

The only real criticism of BotW of Zelink I brought up in that post aside from the self-insert point is that I don’t consider Zelda unlocking her powers in a moment of true love realization to be all that interesting an interpretation of the scene in question. I could easily see someone shipping the two of them even with a different reading of that moment, one that plays more into Zelda’s feelings of inadequacy, her grief over the death of her father and the destruction of Hyrule, her concern for Link’s life in a moment of crisis, etc. Again, I’ve never really read Zelda fanfic, but I’m confident that there are writers who’ve taken that one moment and the dynamic underlying it in vastly different directions. There’s a lot to be said for the value of fan interpretation, even for things that don’t engage you personally. I’m equally uninvested in trans Link headcanons, but I do acknowledge that they go a long way in salvaging the game’s iffy treatment of Link’s crossdressing episode.

And hey, if you still don’t like what I have to say about your ship or anything else for that matter you can always block me. I don’t really know (or care) much about how Tumblr’s blocking system works as I’ve only ever used the feature on robot accounts, but I know that blocking gives some people a more comfortable social media experience.

Oswin/Uther

What I like: It’s surprisingly plausible bara if you’re willing to look for it, and it adds another full layer to Oswin’s interactions with Hector that’s mostly hilarious until it isn’t.

What I don’t like: I always felt like Hector wasn’t given much space to really process his brother’s death in-game (largely because the entire plot point gets glossed over in Eliwood mode), so that goes double for anyone else who would have been close to Uther. 

How I ship it: Standard lord/retainer fare with the hitch that, although neither of them would ever say it, they both feel a little like they’re raising Hector together. Given Ostia’s reputation for its knights it’s probably a manly military affair that only occasionally dips into emotionally intimate territory (though more often as they aged). Ends badly, but it’s not like there are many happy endings in Ostia anyway.